After CPJ letter, Tunis grants journalist freedom to travel

Nearly a week after CPJ sent
a letter to Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali urging him to end the
"ongoing cycle of repression of critical journalists and media outlets," Tunisia's
Ministry of Justice and Human Rights told Mohamed Abbou, a prominent human
rights lawyer and writer, in a phone call on Saturday that he was free to
travel abroad.

"There is no doubt that CPJ's letter and other
actions recently undertaken by international human rights groups helped prompt
this phone call, " Abbou told CPJ. He said he had been arbitrarily prevented
from leaving the country by Tunis airport police on seven
separate occasions.

"They finally acknowledged that no
decision has ever been made to prevent me from leaving the country after my
release from prison in July 2007," Abbou said. The Tunisian Bar Association was
also informed by phone the same day that there were no travel restrictions
imposed on Abbou, journalists told CPJ.

On the eve of the 53rd anniversary of Tunisia's
independence from France, on March 19, CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon told Ben
Ali that various transgressions, including arbitrary restrictions on Abbou's
right to freedom of movement by Tunisian authorities, "thoroughly belie every
statement" he and his government have made about their "proclaimed commitment
to increased press freedom over the past two decades."

Simon urged "in the strongest terms" Ben Ali to take "immediate
and decisive action" to implement his "repeated commitments to freedom of
expression" and to honor his country's pledge to abide by the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Abbou was incarcerated for more than 28 months for
contributing articles to the locally blocked news Web site Tunisnews, in which he compared torture in Tunisia's
prisons to conditions in Iraq's
infamous Abu Ghraib prison and denounced the subservience of Tunisia's
judiciary to the executive branch of government.

In the last few months, international
human rights groups such as Amnesty International, the World Association of
Newspapers, and IFEX Tunisia Monitoring Group invited Abbou to take part in
international meetings in different parts of the world. So did the Doha-based
Al-Jazeera satellite TV channel. But Abbou was prevented from leaving the
country. His freedom of movement within Tunisia had also been tightly restricted. Plainclothes police have often followed him--they even did today,
Abbou told CPJ.

This isn't the first time the
Tunisian government has prevented a journalist from leaving the country. In
August 2008, CPJ wrote to Ben Ali to protest his government's continuing refusal
to grant journalist Slim Boukdhir a passport. To date, Boukdhir still
doesn't have one, and is often harassed since his release from prison
in July. The journalist was released just a few weeks after a CPJ mission to Tunisia;
the findings of that trip were discussed in our report, "The Smiling
Oppressor."

Kamel Labidi is a freelance journalist and former CPJ representative and consultant for the Middle East and North Africa region. Labidi returned from exile to Tunisia in 2011 to head the National Commission to Reform Information and Communication. He resigned in 2012 to protest the lack of political will of the Islamist-led government to implement the commission’s recommendations.